What would you like to see for XPX in 2015?

[mdavis 10]

I'm optimistic that the "Gateway" project will result in addition of quality airport scenery for major airports from our many talented designers.  It's the only practical way to fill in the gaps and populate airports with buildings and control towers.  The autogen scenery in FSX is OK, but things are seldom where they should be, and it's a question of putting things in the wrong place or leaving them out until it can be done right.

 

HOWEVER

 

From a practical standpoint, the sheer magnitude of data is staggering.  I just managed to obtain nearly 100GB (that's GIGABYTES, not megabytes) of HD mesh v3 for installation into XP10.  A major airport contains often over 100MB of data, and there are thousands of them around the world worthy of inclusion.  I think we are better off using the "cloud" for sources of airport scenery rather than expecting LR to include these additional resources on Global DVDs.  And those of us with slow DSL internet lines suffer when trying to suck 100GB onto our HDs (it takes DAYS, not hours).

 

So work on the basics.  ATC is important for some, but flying VATSIM is better - IF you can find controllers where you want to fly.  Perhaps a vendor like Radar Contact will step into the gap?

 

Support for external viewing devices should be a burden to the vendors of those devices, not so much LR.

 

A season awareness coordinated with real weather would be a huge plus.

[MarioDonick 752]

 

 

A major airport contains often over 100MB of data, and there are thousands of them around the world worthy of inclusion.  I think we are better off using the "cloud" for sources of airport scenery rather than expecting LR to include these additional resources on Global DVDs. 

 

The airports in the airport gateway resp. those included as default with XP 10.31 are Lego brick airports and thus should be way below 100 MB each. They are all sharing the same objects which are part of X-Plane anyway. Each of the default airports should just be some KB, not more.

[mdavis 10]

OK, thanks, @mariodonick.  I was basing my numbers on some airport download sizes I noticed for some recent listings, and they were large airports.  I don't pay as much attention to airports as some, and I suspect that those who fly routine VA flights out of the same airports are more interested in dense scenery at their frequent stops than I am.  I fly a little of everything all over the world so I'm more concerned with mesh and landclass than individual airports.

[greggerm 312]

The only thing I can hope for on a practical level is that sales from the mobile platform drum up enough income so they can hire a few more developers to push the desktop platform forward. The wishes in this thread echo that which has been said since day one of X-Plane 10's beta release, and they haven't been able to get over the hump. I share many of the already mentioned hopes - especially those relating to the plausible world and scenery.

 

While I still keep an eye on the X-Plane goings on, some time ago I abandoned it as any form of serious contender for my simming time. It is certainly capable of great things, but....

 

(sigh)

[JimmiG 244]

Well, the past year was definitely the "year of scenery" for X-Plane. We got the HD Mesh v2 scenery at the very end of 2013. There were some small but noticeable enhancements to the X-Plane assets and the scenery engine. We got some amazing airport scenery as well, such as beti-x CZST and many others, payware and freeware. The Airport Gateway was launched, which means in the future there's a good chance that you will get a reasonably accurate representation of most airports without having to hunt down and download third-party scenery. For "sky scenery", we got SkyMaxx v2 and further tweaks to the atmospheric model in X-Plane thanks to FlyWithLUA/RealTerraHaze etc. Then at the end the year we got the HD Mesh v3, further enhancing the base landscape scenery.

 

-Right now, I think X-Plane needs more polish. The user-interface is ugly and clunky, and there are still some visual glitches and strange things that appear when flying sometimes. I would also like to see more varied autogen and textures, which I believe was promised a long time ago.

 

-Per-airport flatten instead of a global option (runway follows terrain contours). Sloped runways are a major selling point of X-Plane, but as soon as you start adding scenery to the sim, you're forced to turn them off globally.

 

-Fully functioning AI traffic and ATC is another much-needed feature, but that would probably be a huge project that might have to wait for X-Plane 11.

 

-I'm also hoping for an official fix for the torque/p-factor issue that has plagued X-Plane. Even though talented developers like Carenado have "hacked" the sim to get around the issue, it's inexcusable that "the world’s most realistic flight simulator" can't even model this correctly.

 

I agree with "greggerm" that the X-Plane development team is too small. P3D has probably got a bigger team, yet they've only focused on one aspect of the sim (rendering engine), while keeping everything else like ATC/AI, textures/objects, flight modelling etc. from FSX. LR on the other hand is continually working on every aspect of the simulator.

[Phantom88 3,287]

-IXEG 737

-Beti-X Bella Coola

-A2A Like GA Aircraft

[MarioDonick 752]

The only thing I can hope for on a practical level is that sales from the mobile platform drum up enough income so they can hire a few more developers to push the desktop platform forward.

 

Have you read my quote of Ben Supnik on the previous page?

 

Here it is again what he said:

 

 

“Hire more developers”. The LR developer team has actually grown significantly over the past 5 years. And it may grow more. But I hear “hire more developers” suggested by users as a panacea for lots of things we have or haven’t done, and my response is the same:

 

– Read “the mythical man month”.

– Understand that scheduled times to ship on products -do not- become shorter by adding more warm bodies.

 

Project ship times are limited by -scope-. One way to understand this is to (as I have done) learn from the school of hard knocks: take a big project, don’t cut scope, add more warm bodies, and watch what happens.

 

Really, it's often an illusion that more people on a project lead to faster speed. The more people you have, the more communication overhead (among other things) you need.

[alulekk 3]

Have you read my quote of Ben Supnik on the previous page?

 

Here it is again what he said:

 

 

Really, it's often an illusion that more people on a project lead to faster speed. The more people you have, the more communication overhead (among other things) you need.

 

Ok - Then I guess we just want them to become better communicators internally, focus on a tighter scope and push more updates - faster.

Whatever Lockheed has the P3D team doing is working well - Another update due shortly (v2.5).

 

Perhaps it's a nice table in the break room?  :-)

[greggerm 312]

 

 

Really, it's often an illusion that more people on a project lead to faster speed.

 

I understand this - it is much like the commonly held misconception that a multi-core processor will make your computer 2x or 4x faster just by virtue of having two or four times as many CPUs in your computer. It just doesn't work that way (nor is it supposed to!), There are some elements which would be very nice to have in X-Plane 10 which probably can be created or enhanced in parallel to whatever work Ben and the existing team have going on with X-Plane Desktop, X-Plane iOS, and X-Plane Android.

 

I look at HDMesh as an example - Andras has cranked out three fantastic new sets of meshes over the past couple of years. I know Ben had a hand in things to a degree, but the mesh is the result of primarily one person doing the lion's share of work on enhancements to a commonly criticized part of X-Plane 10's default world.

 

We've heard since day one that the landclass texturing and autogen capabilities of X-Plane 10 are waiting on new art assets, and we shouldn't judge what we see today as the finished product. With these items on hold for months or years presumably due to the lack of artists to do the job, I think the door is open for someone to be hired for a little contract work. Maybe?

 

Is it wrong of me to hope that the one thing I hope we *DON'T* see in 2015 is any mention of X-Plane 11? There's still so much untapped potential in v10....

 

-Greg

[JasonHarris 96]

Have you read my quote of Ben Supnik on the previous page?

 

Here it is again what he said:

 

 

Really, it's often an illusion that more people on a project lead to faster speed. The more people you have, the more communication overhead (among other things) you need.

 

   Yes and no..   I could cite many examples of projects that I have worked on where more people would not gain you a 40 hour advantage for an extra 40 hours worked by an extra person.

 

    Similarly, I could cite examples where this does work.   If I was to generalise between the different projects then the ones that scale better are larger and are designed in such a way as to let this happen.

 

    For the smaller projects sometimes this kind of design is not necessary for the scale of the work, it's basically overkill - you know, writing the hello world app doesnt have to be object oriented with layers of abstraction when one line has worked for decades

 

    Having said that, I would expect that xplane should be developed so that some things like AI, ATC can be worked on relatively independently from physics, graphics, etc..

 

Support for external viewing devices should be a burden to the vendors of those devices, not so much LR.

 

 

 

   The rift is gaining a lot of popularity in cockpit based games/sims.  Unfortunately while they provide an API it is not something that they can inject in to an existing sim with a good experience.

 

    It's very much like TrackIR, the sim needs to integrate it in to it's own engine.   I have seen a number of die hard simmers now decide the titles they use have to have rift support and thats just from a developers kit, once it becomes more mainstream I expect to see more if that.

[tonywob 4,768]

 

 

Similarly, I could cite examples where this does work.   If I was to generalise between the different projects then the ones that scale better are larger and are designed in such a way as to let this happen.
 
    For the smaller projects sometimes this kind of design is not necessary for the scale of the work, it's basically overkill - you know, writing the hello world app doesnt have to be object oriented with layers of abstraction when one line has worked for decades

 

+1 I'm a programmer for a living and work on many different projects, and it nearly always depends on the scale of the project. If it's a small project such as W2XP, then the application doesn't need to be modular and it's enough for one person to work on it. For large applications, everything is modular so that other programmers can work on parts without knowledge of how the other parts work. With W2XP, I separated the artwork out into its own opensource library so others can contribute whilst I worked on the application, and this model worked very well. I'd be very surprised if X-Plane isn't built like this (and all evidence points to the fact that it is), it would be very counter-productive otherwise. 

 

Additionally, some of the biggest complaints of X-Plane can be fixed by third-party applications, e.g. ATC/AI. AFAIK the framework will allow this. From my quick glance through the SDK, it looks possible to place and control objects, which means if someone really wanted to, they could write their own AI implementation, ATC, etc.. The fact that nobody is doing this probably means that nobody sees it as profitable/worthwhile yet. LR should never have promised to add this functionality earlier on and then abandoned it half finished, because users will remember and get snotty about it. Which is very evident reading the posts that crop up a lot on this forum. If they add this as a chargeable new feature in X-Plane 11 then I can see it making their loyal user base angry.

 

 

 

We've heard since day one that the landclass texturing and autogen capabilities of X-Plane 10 are waiting on new art assets, and we shouldn't judge what we see today as the finished product. With these items on hold for months or years presumably due to the lack of artists to do the job, I think the door is open for someone to be hired for a little contract work. Maybe?

 

There is so much talent out there looking for work that contracting a few artists in to create 3D objects, artwork, textures would make sense to me. I see the work that some people can do in a a month or so, e.g. Russ who used to do airports for ORBX. Some of us have been doing this ourselves, e.g. W2XP, the Europe library, because people were fed up of the entire X-Plane world looking like LR's backyard. Some things we can't do because of lack of documentation and disorganisation, e.g. I'd love to redo the roads for Europe, but can't as the documentation hasn't been updated since XP9, and it's often hard to get any response or help from the developers (Or the one publicly known developer of X-Plane).

 

OSM seems almost a perfect solution to the lack of scenery, but how many simmers actually contribute to it when they find their town empty, I'd wager that ~0.1% of us actually do and instead just complain or look for payware. More of us are creating airports and uploading them to the gateway and the .org. Sometimes X-Plane feels like partially an opensource project, but with large parts we can't touch. 

[JasonHarris 96]

 

 

Additionally, some of the biggest complaints of X-Plane can be fixed by third-party applications, e.g. ATC/AI. AFAIK the framework will allow this. From my quick glance through the SDK, it looks possible to place and control objects, which means if someone really wanted to, they could write their own AI implementation, ATC, etc.. The fact that nobody is doing this probably means that nobody sees it as profitable/worthwhile yet. LR should never have promised to add this functionality earlier on and then abandoned it half finished, because users will remember and get snotty about it. Which is very evident reading the posts that crop up a lot on this forum. If they add this as a chargeable new feature in X-Plane 11 then I can see it making their loyal user base angry.

 

 

 

 

Interesting, I have not looked at the api for some time.   Because of the AI issue I looked at it, although this was some time ago.

 

   I knew that in FSX for example you could easily add an ai aircraft in a position in space and move it around, so you could create your own very basic lightweight (on cpu), or complicated, flight model.

 

    This seemed to be a good way to get lots of aircraft in the air and move them around.

 

    I seemed to remember that in xpx there was no way to do this.  IIRC, you couldnt spwan something in space like an aircraft, you had to create an ai aircraft and that had all the overheads of creating a fully AI aircraft.  I think there were significant overheads in doing it and you still came up with the problem of adding too many.

 

    This is from memory but I think that was the gist of it.

[tonywob 4,768]

 

 

seemed to remember that in xpx there was no way to do this.  IIRC, you couldnt spwan something in space like an aircraft, you had to create an ai aircraft and that had all the overheads of creating a fully AI aircraft.  I think there were significant overheads in doing it and you still came up with the problem of adding too many.
 
    This is from memory but I think that was the gist of it.

 

I'll need to check about adding other aircraft, but I was thinking more along the lines of cheating and just adding a 3D moving object of the plane which interacts with the scenery. If we know where the taxiways, parking, runways are etc from the airport .dat files and the datarefs allow us to query the surroundings, using some clever programming you could simulate this in a rudimentary form. You wouldn't need a full aircraft physics engine just to simulate aircraft following static routes, landing, taxing, taking off, etc.. There are similar plugins which do this, e.g. There is one that simulates boat traffic, and there is actually an AI plugin already but it requires users to prerecord or program routes in.

[JasonHarris 96]

OK Tony, you may have the way to do it, I didnt look at it from the scenery point of view as I had seen what the fsx api had to offer so I looked for something similar.

 

    I suppose if you can treat a model of an aircraft as a simple object, move and rotate it's position then thats more or less what I was thinking as well.

[MarioDonick 752]

 

 

'll need to check about adding other aircraft, but I was thinking more along the lines of cheating and just adding a 3D moving object of the plane which interacts with the scenery. If we know where the taxiways, parking, runways are etc from the airport .dat files and the datarefs allow us to query the surroundings, using some clever programming you could simulate this in a rudimentary form. You wouldn't need a full aircraft physics engine just to simulate aircraft following static routes, landing, taxing, taking off, etc.. There are similar plugins which do this, e.g. There is one that simulates boat traffic, and there is actually an AI plugin already but it requires users to prerecord or program routes in.

 

If I understand your idea correctly, this sounds very much like what WorldTraffic is doing, although it gets the positions of taxiways from lat/lon coordinates.

 

The problem with WorldTraffic is that nobody creates proper flight plans.